


A Storm

by Annabel7



Category: Treasure Island - Lavery, Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, F/M, Fear/Comfort, Female Jim Hawkins, Missing Scene, based on the national theatre production, canon-typical creepy on silver's part, tw: alchohol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28372092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7
Summary: Jim retreats back to the galley after her brush with death during the storm. Memories, nightmares, and Silver all follow.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	A Storm

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between the storm and the star scene.
> 
> Jim is sixteen or so here, and while nothing *happens* exactly, this could be seen as sensitive material.

The cabin girl had vanished.

Silver was disappointed, as sailors kept shouting at him get the hell back below decks where he _belonged_ , let the men with two legs and two arms help the ship fight through the storm. Of course Silver doesn’t miss the backbreaking work of being on deck, not truly, even during a storm, but the _power_ of it… The lightning that blinded while setting the ocean alight, like fire on water, alchemy in its most pure; thunder that shook his ribcage. It was rage in its most natural state, an ocean angered by man’s attempt to conquer her.

The girl had shaken like a banner on the mizzenmast in his arms—she had a _tether_ , no reason to be so upset, and he gathered it up and wrapped it around her again, knotting it closer to her slim waist. He told her some terrible line about how the storm couldn’t have her, but as soon as a pause in the cresting waves had given her time, Jim had raced back below.

_What a storm!_ Easily the remnants of a hurricane, and he had wanted to share that with her, show it to her, teach her to feel the sea engulf them…

She had been so accepting of all his other lessons. Jim with her head for names memorized every rope and sail, and knew all the roles on a ship. She learned the sailor songs that rang out from the galley every night so quickly. He might make a pirate of her yet, and he hopes to just that. A sweet and clever kid…

A (usually) brave and obedient girl…

…A strong and admiring young woman.

As the captain raged at him again for undue risk, at seeing him hauling in a line with the rest of the crew, he had growled his lack of care in response, and slunk off to the hatch too, better on his one good leg in a storm than most of these miserable swabs are with two.

Flint just _had_ to go and kill all the good sailors, didn’t he? Black Dog, mad from sun, was about all the competence that was left, and even he was never as good at sea as he was in a raid.

“Jim?” Silver admits to himself that his voice is a bit rough; he’s annoyed, insulted, but Jim’s particular flavor of nonsense and endless prattle might ease his mood.

There’s one lantern swinging sharply, left hanging in the middle of the galley, and he takes it down. Still, he can hardly hear himself think for the rage of the storm, the waves bashing the ship as she lurched, the little schooner fighting for her life. Figures, the one single time that the girl isn’t trailing him around like an oversized duckling is the one time he wants the amusement. “Cabin girl, come out, come out…”

* * *

She had never been more afraid in her life.

Sure, some frightening things had happened to her, and she had heard some terrible stories about things she had almost forgotten—but all so old, so distant.

A memory: Livesey and the town midwife talking over brandy at the inn, when Jim overheard mention that she was the doctor who had pulled her out of the stiff arms of her brother when he had died of fever in the night: all five of the Hawkins children shivering together in their parents bed while mother and father could hardly climb the stairs, Grandma alone seemingly untouched by it. Jim remembers hallucinating her mother rocking her and singing to her, and sometimes has dreams about the woman, and sometimes about her father, but their faces were vague and she doesn’t remember her siblings’ faces at all.

But something is clawing at her ankle and she’s sure in that terrible moment that it’s a monster of her youngest dead sister, trying to pull her back through the decks, down underwater to die, as she should have all those years ago. Jim screams, and climbs farther back into her hiding place behind the blessedly cold stove.

_“No, master storm. This girl belongs to me_.”

It made her feel _safe_ for only a moment, the arms that had so often been tossed around her shoulders in mock-conspiracy or what she imagines paternal affection must feel like had caught her tight, around her waist and chest. Her own arms—strong for her size from work, but still scrawny—don’t make her feel half as protected as she hugs herself tight.

She whimpers, plugging her ears with her fingers against the thunder, even though part of her knows that the storm is dying down, and feels horribly let down by it in some twisted fashion: how _dare_ something so awful vanish so easily, as if it never happened to her at all.

Again, some phantom scratches at her ankle and she screams, kicks at it, and realizes it was merely one of the rats from the bilge below. She almost feels sorry as it runs off squeaking.

Even through her fingers he can hear the lantern get roughly unhooked from its mount.

“Cabin girl, come out, come out…”

She sees Silver’s mismatched ankles in front of her when she peeks through her eyelids.

“ _What_ are you doin’ down there?” he asks, annoyed.

Jim closes her eyes tight again, covers her ears, and only now realizes that she had been weeping.

* * *

She’s too bloody old for this kind of behavior.

Still, Silver has to take a second to breathe deep for the first time since he saw her on deck—a nagging, cruel thought had him worried that she had fallen overboard on her way back below decks. _Worried_. He would have missed her, even though he has been, up to that point, more irked by her than amused, how she follows closer than his own shadow, follows closer than ghosts, how she never stops talking, never stops moving but…

He would have _missed_ her.

“What are you doing down there?” he repeats, and receives no answer. The poor thing is curled up into a tight ball and shaking. He sighs, leans hard back onto the false leg as he bends his good knee, and scoops her up by the back of her shirt. Like a kitten, she doesn’t protest but limps in shock. He hooks the lantern onto the metal pot hangers that Flint likes to use as perches, and buckles a little under even her slight weight trying to carry her with both arms. Carefully he makes their way into the annex of the galley where his bunk and her hammock lay waiting, silent observers.

* * *

Jim doesn’t respond to his arm under her back, his other under her knees, but she curls into herself rather than holding to him. It’s so _strange_ , but he’s her friend, like Dr. Livesey pulling her from a bed of death, and carrying her to what had been her room ever since. That was, perhaps, the last time anyone had ever lifted her up until now. Strange, to think that there was a point in time that was the last she was lifted, the last she was hugged, the last time her parents kissed her good night. All those hazy memories but not one stood out as the last.

Her grandmother at least knew when the last time she would see her grandfather was, she knew that the story men told around the bar when she was busy in the kitchens wasn’t one she wanted to hear again. A man cockily waving to her from the gallows, hat askew, children left home to be watched by her mother, the oldest. Jim had always been curious if he was a pirate, a petty thief, a murderer even, but her mother’s stories always made him seem so kindly.

More likely than not, she figures, Silver is going to bring her to her hammock and chastise her for being such a frightened child. There would be a lecture on how important _work_ is on a ship and she would fall asleep before he was on his own side of the annex.

But instead of that, Silver drops her onto his own bunk with a sigh.

_Wait—that’s not right_.

Her eyes widen. She can’t bring herself to move.

* * *

Silver isn’t the sort of bad man that makes a habit of chasing the skirts of young girls—true.

Silver isn’t a good man, and he knows it—also true.

He _is_ the sort not to mind that the cabin girl is a good deal younger than the usual women he goes after. He _isn’t_ the sort of good man to wake in shame after occasional dreams of her staring up at him from his bunk.

But this is no dream, and Jim looks proper _scared_. Silver sighs, stares back at her for a moment, and leans over her. Jim gasps, either afraid or aroused, but he dismisses both possibilities in favor of reaching for his blanket, balled up and unused for the past weeks in the subtropics’ warmth, and shakes it out to place around the girl’s shoulders.

“H-How…” very little of her voice escapes her, and he meets her eyes again in the lantern light as she tugs his blanket tight around herself, skittering back against the wall. “How long do these storms last?”

“A day or so at most, but we’re sailing aside of it. Should be out of it by mornin’,” he answers, and he is a bad man, and he does not tell her that it’s like as not that they’re long past the worst of the storm, even if the winds are howling against the water, and the waves beating the vessel. He hopes the captain is wise enough to sail north by northwest on the return—

—Then again, it’s not as if the captain is likely to return at all.

“Do—do these storms happen a lot?”

“Yearly, a few of them, some softer, some worse,” He takes the lantern and turns back towards the galley—

“Don’t go on up again!”

It stops him in his tracks. The cabin girl giving _him_ orders.

She didn’t tell him out of desperation and fear ‘ _don’t leave me’_. She didn’t ask where he was going, or when he would return, and the instant anger at having a command barked at him by a subordinate is replaced with curiosity.

“What’s that, girl?”

“Don’t go on the deck again—What if—? What if another wave comes up and—!”

“You don’t think a one-legged sailor can stand against a storm?”

“I don’t think any of the sailors with _two_ legs stand much of a chance either.” She picks at a loose thread on the blanket’s rough edge, but her eyes peek up from her bowed head, catching lantern light.

She’s _worried…_ about _him._

He changes his mind again.

If she comes onto him when he returns, he’ll have her.

“I’m just going to get a drink,” it doesn’t satisfy her, “I’ll be straight back.”

“ _Hurry_ , please,” she mutters, tugs his blanket tighter around her. Silver turns away from her before he can witness her relax too much.

* * *

Jim settles uneasily, the ship rocking so far in the waves it feels as if she’ll slide right off of the bunk—and she notes, in terror, that the wooden panel comes slightly above the thin mattress seems to be just for that purpose. _These storms must be faced every journey_. The terrible storms that used roar off of the sea, grab the walls of the inn and shake it used to thrill her, even as they frightened her but this was different, in the wide, dark loneliness of the sea.

…Or here in the cramped, dark loneliness of their tiny pantry of a cabin.

Livesey allowed her to hang her hammock with the cook when she woke her too often with seasickness. Even then, it took begging. Jim remembers waiting outside the captain’s office with her things rolled up in sailcloth as the captain and Livesey both spoke with (or rather, _to)_ Silver before the change of rooms was agreed upon. What little conversation she could overhear through the door was stern on their part, and soft on Silver’s, jovial and laughing, once a note of disgust.

Silver refused to look her in the eye when he walked out of the captain’s office, still trying to be friendly with Smollet, and with Livesey, both of whom looked at him like he was an outlier on the ship, which Jim didn’t think was very fair. She herself was a cabin _girl_. Dr. Livesey knows better than to think anyone strange or peculiar. Well, _fine_. Her and Silver would be strangers together, cooking and cleaning and sleeping in the galley, and as long he keeps to his word, he’ll return soon to what has, for the past wonderful weeks, been _their_ room.

Jim’s hammock is close enough to Silver’s bunk that if both were to reach out at night, their hands would pass each other, even if they wouldn’t quite reach the whole way across. His bed isn’t soft, but it’s a comfort to rest on after so many nights in the hammock, and his blanket actually long enough she can wrap it around herself.

When he comes back in, it’s with the lantern still in one hand and a nearly full mug in the other. It’s breaking the rules—there’s no fire to be had below decks after eight, he’s breaking the rules, but he breaks little rules all the time, despite telling her how important it was for rules to be kept on a ship. He once said that pirates follow the rules, so do the navy, and on both it was the role of the quartermaster to see that they were followed though. Captain Smollet didn’t _have_ a quartermaster, she had retorted with, and Silver had said then that it seemed like a poor choice on his part.

“What’s this?” she asks, as Silver hands her the mug and turns the lantern down low enough it’s like to burn itself out in an hour at most. Silver rests a hand on her hammock, as if testing how well it’s hung.

“Water…with rum, lime, and plenty of mint. For your nerves.”

“I don’t have _nerves_.”

“Jim.”

“Thank you,” she sips at it, and it burns. Livesey never allowed her to drink, but for the squire’s toast of brandy at the start of the voyage: hardly a teaspoon, and it made her gag despite how little of it there was. She pulls a face, it was certainly more rum than water, but soon the burning subsides and the mint comes out of it; it’s calming and fragrant. “It’s good,” she smiles for a brief moment, but can’t bring herself to finish it either, feeling woozy already from the storm and the fear, and unwilling to let herself get drunk. _How much does it take to even get drunk_? She hands it to Silver, but instead of walking out with it, or covering it to avoid it sloshing as the ship tilted, he tips it back and drinks the last of it.

For being a cold drink, it warmed her. Silver standing over her, and to her it seems protective. Calming.

But a wave beats the ship, and she can’t hold back a muffled shriek of fear. She covers her ears, and then her face; afraid of the disappointed look he’s probably giving her in the dim light.

“Oh that’s nothing, girl.” He’s—there’s a twitch of a smile about his lips, but it never forms. “I’ve seen waves tall enough to crash on the cliffs of Black Cove. Storms so strong they drink the water from the sea and spit it out in a _cyclone_ —nights where the skies are so dark that light forgets where it belongs and makes the main mast glow in the middle of it,”

“You’re making that up.” She’s wanted to accuse him of it a number of times, and has professed her inability to believe half of his nonsense, but always playfully, always saying she couldn’t believe it when really she was just begging him to convince her that the world really was as magnificent and strange as he was telling her it was.

“On my honest life, not a word of it. I’ve seen it all. There’s even places where on clear nights there’s glittering fires in the sky, greens and purples, in the far north.”

“Like Edinburgh?”

“I mean close to the pole. Strange worlds where volcanoes rise under ice, and there’s dragons in the mountains.”

“Now I _know_ you’re making it up,” she mumbles. He’s silent a moment, leaning against the wall, watching her for what feels like ages. Thunder, and a howl of wind louder than the waves occur suddenly enough that Silver startles too.

“Bloody _hell_ , doesn’t the captain know to just sail in a line out of it?”

Jim giggles when he curses. She can’t help it, every oath and swear he says makes her laugh, even though she knows she’s too old to find it funny.

“You’re shakin’ like a loose sail,” he says, and with a hesitant step forward, crosses the narrow space to sit next to her on the bunk.

* * *

She’s so _cold,_ is the first thought that hits him when he pries one of her hands from the blanket with both of his.

“Stop your worryin’, girl,” he says softly, thumbs rubbing at her frozen palm. He can smell rum on her breath, or perhaps it’s from his own. “Nothing’s gonna happen,”

“I _hate_ storms.”

“Brave cabin girl like you?”

“I’m not brave.”

“Nah, you’re brave. All those stories of running in the woods and climbing down to the cove on your lonesome? You came to sea, didn’t you? Bold as a pirate, you are.” She doesn’t look up at him, but the hand he isn’t holding curls tighter into the blanket. “What you are though, is cold,”

“I’m freezing... And _wet_ ,” she says pitifully, and Silver ignores the sudden southern rush of blood at how _those_ words are finished with a shudder and bite of her lip.

“Part of being on a ship,” he shrugs. She sniffles. They should be in the galley, in front of the furnace, and Silver wonders if he orchestrated her being in here instead. Sure, he carried her in, but she’s more comfortable in this small space than she would be in the open galley. Jim wriggles in her spot, trying to warm up, or perhaps still scared. Poor thing.

“ _Whatiftheshipgoesunder_?!”

“Then we swim out, find a jollyboat, sail to Nassau, hitch a ride home with pirates,”

“That’s not _funny_ ,” she says through a bitten lip, as if she finds it very funny.

“Not funny at all, that’s my plan. Sail you home and then I go back to the Spy-Glass.”

He keeps gently rubbing at her hand, unaware he’s still doing it. Jim stares.

“Do you like the Spy-Glass?”

“’S a good a place as any.”

“If we can afford it after this adventure, maybe Grandma could hire a cook. And then I wouldn’t have to—“ she winces, a hiss of pain— “do all the work. I hate work,”

“What?”

“I’ve got a cut on my hand,” she tries to tug it back, slides away from him, but he holds onto her hand, lifts it to inspect, in the quickly dimming lantern glow.

“What, that? That’s just a scratch, you’ll get worse than that if you’re going to become a sailor,” he’s almost teasing when the warmth of the rum and a body so close convince him to use a kiss as an excuse to hold her hand closer to examine what he thinks is a paper cut. _Paper cut from what? From a map?_ He lifts her hand up to his mouth, to distract her from how long he examined such a simple wound, but stops short of contact when he catches the look on her face.

She’s plenty distracted now. Silver knows her expression well: the wide-eyes, lips parted in a slight _oh,_ and pink in her cheeks. Maybe it’s been several years since he’s gotten more than a few glances like that, but he recognizes the look as a prelude to crumbling decorum, torn skirts, and the particular music of a well-pleased woman. Her hand turns in his and holds it back.

“Silver—“ she doesn’t call him that, not usually. “I—“

But the ship lurches and she pales, almost crying again, she leans back against the wall of their little pantry-cabin, and sinks onto the thin bedding.

“Please don’t go—“ she sounds so _bloody young_.

“Get some sleep, girl,” he huffs. He certainly won’t; he knows that much as he looks up at the cabin girl’s abandoned hammock. Her calf is pressed against his hip where she lays right now, and he can feel that she’s shaking.

Under the sound of the wind, the sound of the ship, and the occasional shout on deck, Jim hums to herself—an old shanty Silver only ever heard on the docks, and never at sea.

“Bright morning stars are risin’,” he half sings in reply, low and mumbled, tucking the blankets around her. He leans over her to do it, but she shifts, leaving him partially trapped between her and the wall.

“Where did you learn the star song?” she asks with a sniffle, curling up into a miserable little ball again.

“Learn a lot of songs, living on ships your whole life.”

“My mum sang it to me,” she pauses. With a frown, and her eyes closed, she continues: “Her da taught it to her. I don’t remember him. I don’t really remember her…” she hums a bit again.

_Bugger._

Silver sighs, rolls his eyes at himself and settles behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist.

* * *

Dr. Livesey had said, don’t ever let him touch you, don’t let him close the doors to the galley, don’t, don’t, don’t, _don’t_.

She isn’t here, and neither is her mother, her father, her grandfather, siblings, and not even Grandma. Silver is her best friend, and he’s only trying to calm her. He’s not even under the sheets.

Jim wriggles closer to him. He is warm, and sings nearly at a whisper the words that her mother used to use to rock her to sleep.

“Bright morning stars are risin’, day is a'breaking in my soul…” as he goes on, his voice shifts from a mumble in tune to actual singing, and he isn’t awful.

It occurs to her that this is the first time in a month that someone has hugged her. Grandma would, when she would think to or remember, usually once a day or so, but now it has been weeks, and the mere sensation of having someone near makes the storm quieter.

In a few hours she’ll wake to find him asleep behind her, snoring into her hair, and doze off again.

* * *

_Another hour from that, he will wake and limp out to the galley, tend the furnace, and start cooking. Dr. Livesey will want to know where Jim since he girl isn’t standing directly beside him. He’ll nod towards the cramped little cabin. The woman won’t trust him. The woman will have no reason to trust him. She shouldn’t trust him. If not for the fact that Jim loves her, the plan wouldn’t include trying to see that she survives the mutiny. She still might not, but he’ll do his best._

_Livesey will look in and see Jim asleep on his bed, in his sheets, under his coat._

_“Where did you sleep, cook?” she’ll ask. She will already sound seasick again, but whether it will be in fear that Silver has shared his bed with the girl, or from the movement of the ship, he won’t know._

_“In her hammock; poor thing was shakin’ and cryin’ through the storm. I thought a sturdier surface might help that.”_

It had played out so easily in in his head, so plainly, that when the events unfold moments later, Silver feels as if he already lived them.

* * *

Jim wakes up surrounded by the ship-stale smell of someone other than herself, and remembers where she is. She pulls his blankets around herself and rolls over, wraps her arms around his lumpy pillow (if such a sad small thing could be called such) and squeezes it tight, her face turned into the bedding, and a sheepish grin blooms across her face in the dark.

It wasn’t a bad thing she had done, she rationalizes, and she feels a bit of a baby for having needed the comfort and the lullaby. The heat of embarrassment boils heavily in her head and threatens to make her nauseous, but it’s quickly out-burned by a very different warmth, in her chest, her belly, and farther, stranger places yet.

She turns to the wall, Silver’s coat, pillow, wrapped up in her arms, legs tangled in his twisted sheets, and she breathes deep to fuel the flames. If only she couldn’t hear him so close by; without the threat of his intrusion, she’d see about stoking the fire herself.


End file.
